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Studiohead was approached by Dr. Roger Kneebone, an eminent surgeon and reader in surgical education at Imperial College School of Medicine, London, to explore the concept of Distributed simulation. A pioneer in the field of surgical simulation, his hypothesis was that by recreating only key elements of the surgical environment you could create a low cost, portable and immersive simulation that could be used to train surgeons and widen access to high fidelity simulation.
By combining a realistic simulation of the operating theatre environment with professional actors in the roles of patients and team members, it would be possible to train surgeons how to deal with real-world stressful situations such as uncooperative patients or ineffective surgical teams.
Our brief encompassed designing the environment and incorporating key features required for realism; building in an interface for recording and control; and ensuring a portable and lightweight system.
We spent many hours observing real operations and drawing on the insights that fresh eyes to the subject provided. The result was an inflatable surround, with pop up furniture and a custom overhead LED operating lamp with built-in camera an microphone.
Designed to be entirely controlled from a laptop, a custom made computer interface allows a trainer to control background noise, which we found to be invaluable in enhancing the realism experienced by the surgeon, and to control the heart rate of the patient. The interface, which is designed to be intuitive for non-technical operators, also allows for capture of video streams from three separate camera perspectives, and audio from the microphone.
The result has been extremely well received by medical professionals as it goes through validation studies, and applications of this idea in related areas are attracting further funding and more exciting design work.